finding time

Time…the age old issue: never having enough of it! 8 hours a day at work and 8 hours a day sleeping. That leaves me with 8 hours a day for everything else I need to do or want to do. That seems like a lot of time, why doesn’t if feel like a lot of time? Maybe I need to narrow it down more. So of my free 8 hours I use 3 and a half hours preparing meals, eating, getting ready for work, hygiene, and daily chores like dishes. So that leaves me with 4 and a half hours. I use 1 hour for working out, more if I travel to the gym, and a minimum of 30 minutes hanging out with my family. So I end up with 3 hours, which still seems like a lot, but doesn’t feel like it. Weekends would be a whole separate calculation, so I’m just going to focus on week days for now because that is the majority of my life. And I don’t want to “live for the weekend”. I want to find ways to enjoy the weekdays.

So the question I am dealing with right now, is how do I maximize my 3 hours a day to do things I want to do and enjoy doing, so that I fill like I’m living a fulfilled life? So the first thing I did was make a list of things I want to do. Then I paid attention to what I actually do with my time. I found that my phone, with the draw of social media, email, news, and mindless video games, was a huge time suck. Not hours at a time, but minutes here and there that add up. I’ve also discovered that if I look at my phone right before bed, I get sucked into something and end up wasting sleep time by staying up too late on the phone. I noticed that when my husband turns on the TV, I often get sucked into going and sitting with him, even though I have no interest in watching whatever he’s watching.

After this reflective work, I decided to create a plan for myself, with a schedule of sorts to make sure I was doing the things I wanted to do each day. First, when I’m at home after work, I am going to treat my phone as a phone and leave it in the bedroom, where I can hear it if it rings, but I have to walk purposefully into the room to check something else on it. By not having it constantly by my side, I’ll be less likely to pick it up and get sucked into wasting time. When you search time management on the internet, you will see over and over again the idea of a schedule. So my schedule isn’t going to be time bound, but more of an outline of what activity from my list I’m going to do each day. I should be able to spend an hour a day doing an activity and still have time to read and blog, which are also activities I want to do daily.

So that’s the plan going forward for this aspect of my life as I continue to try to live a happy, healthy and active lifestyle!